Tropical Legumes III

‘Improving livelihoods for smallholder farmers: Enhanced grain legume productivity and production in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia’

Tropical Legumes III (TL III), led by ICRISAT, is a major international initiative supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and jointly implemented by International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) partners from Sub-Saharan Africa and India. TL III aims to develop improved cultivars of common bean, cowpea, chickpea and groundnut and deliver their seed at scale to small-holders in BMGF focus geographies. It will also fundamentally strengthen the NARS and CGIAR's breeding programs and seed platforms to enhance their ability to deliver high and sustained output to small-holder farmers. TL III project builds directly upon the outputs and momentum of the Foundation (BMGF) funded Tropical Legumes I and Tropical Legumes II (TL I and TL II) projects and is strategically focused on four crops - cowpea, common bean, groundnut and chickpea and in seven geographies -Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda; and the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. TL III will integrate the genomic resources developed in the TL I (TL I Product Catalog) with the applied breeding and seed delivery initiatives of TL II.